Absentee voting only works if voters get their ballots

It seems clear that Wisconsin’s spring primary election couldn’t have gone much worse. But turns out it did. In addition to the uncertainty over whether there would even be in-person voting last Tuesday, turns out many who requested absentee ballots never received them. Some potential voters had requested the absentee ballots by mail weeks before the election, but they never arrived in their mailboxes. In Southeast Wisconsin, three tubs of absentee ballots were found undelivered. In a rare showing of bipartisanship, U.S. Senators Ron Johnson and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin are calling on the Wisconsin Elections Commission and the U.S. Postal Service to investigate what went wrong. Clearly, in order for a mail-in vote system to work properly, voters need to receive their ballots. That didn’t happen in the national embarrassment that was the Wisconsin primary. We need to figure out what went wrong, and how to fix it, before the next three elections scheduled in Wisconsin in 2020. As clerks throughout the state prepare to begin counting the in-person and absentee ballots today, it is clear not all potential votes will be counted. We need to be assured that won’t happen again.